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The series of images begins with that of the mercurial fountain, symbolizing
the aroused energy of transformation and continues with the meeting of the
King and Queen, first fully clad and later having relinquished their
garments. The lovers thus confront each other with their personae and
defenses, but proceed to a meeting in "naked truth". The partners then
immerse themselves in the alchemical bath, thus allowing the force of love
to engulf their conscious egos, blotting out rational and mundane
considerations. While in this state of passionate engulfment the
psychosexual union (coniunctio) takes place. But, contrary expectations,
this union, which initially brought forth a newly formed androgynous being,
results in death. The spiritual result of love is not viable and, having
expired, undergoes decomposition.
It is at this point that the force of commitment to the process (though not
necessarily to a particular partner) becomes all-important. By not
abandoning the transformational work, the soul of the dead androgyne ascends
to heaven, i.e., to a higher level of consciousness, while the body is
washed in celestial dew. Soon the departed soul returns to its earthly body,
and the reanimated corpse stands in its full, numinous glory for all to see.
A new being is born which is the promised fruit of love, the transformed
consciousness of the lovers, formed of the opposites, which are now welded
into an inseparable imperishable wholeness. The alchemy of love has reached
its true and triumphant culmination.
In The Psychology of the Transference, Jung has shared with the world his
uniquely practical insight not only into the psychological mechanism of love
but into the process of the reconciliation of all opposites - emotive,
intellectual, physical, and metaphysical. Far more readily understood than
his definitive treatise Psychology and Alchemy, this disquisition on the
Alchemy of Eros is one of the most lucid and concise treatments of the
process of unitive transformation. Published in 1945, it is not only a
worthy successor to his earlier work, but also an excellent primer of the
psychological approach to alchemy. In love, as in psychological growth, the
key to success is the ability to endure the tension of the opposites without
abandoning the process, even if the process and its result appear to have
been brought to naught. In our impatient age, replete with divorce,
fickleness, and the pursuit of change, these psycho-alchemical insights are
very much needed indeed!
The Alchemical Sophia
Jung's two greatest works on Alchemy are Psychology and Alchemy and
Mysterium Coniunctionis, the latter representing his final summing up of the
implications of his long preoccupation with alchemy. In this last summary of
his insights on the subject, influenced in part by his collaboration with
the Nobel Prize winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, the old Jung envisions a
great psycho-physical mystery to which the alchemists of old gave the name
of unus mundus (one world). At the root of all being, so he intimates, there
is a state wherein physicality and spirituality meet in a transgressive
union. Synchronistic phenomena, and many more as yet unexplained mysteries
of physical and psychological nature, appear to proceed from this unitive
condition. It is more than likely that this mysterious condition is the true
home of the archetypes as such, which merely project themselves into the
realm of the psyche, but in reality abide elsewhere. While the tensional
relationship of the opposites remains the great operational mechanism of
manifest life and of transformation, this relationship exists within the
context of a unitary world-model wherein matter and spirit, King and Queen,
appear as aspects of a psychoid realm of reality.
The ever-repeated charge of radical dualism leveled against Gnostics and
their alchemical kin is thus reduced to a misunderstanding by this last, and
perhaps greatest, insight of Jung. The workings of the cosmos, both physical
and psychic, are characterized by duality, but this principle is relative to
the underlying reality of the unus mundus. Dualism and monism are thus
revealed not as mutually contradictory and exclusive but as complimentary
aspects of reality. It is a curious paradox that this revolutionary insight,
impressively portrayed by Jung in Mysterium Coniunctionis, has received
relatively little attention from psychologists and metaphysicians alike.
Alchemical interest and perception permeate many of Jung's numerous writings
in addition to those devoted primarily to the subject. His work Psychology
and Religion: West and East, as well as numerous lectures delivered at the
Eranos conferences, all utilize the alchemical model as a matrix for his
teachings. Time and again he pointed out the affinities and contrasts
between alchemical figures and those of Christianity, demonstrating a sort
of mirror-like analogy not only between the stone of the philosophers and
the image of Christ, but between alchemy and Christianity themselves.
Alchemy, said Jung, stands in a compensatory relationship to mainstream
Christianity, rather like a dream does to the conscious attitudes of the
dreamer. The Stone of alchemy is in many respects the stone rejected by the
builders of Christian culture, demanding recognition and reincorporation
into the building itself.
It is here that some of the considerations outlined at the outset of our
present study appear once more. Alchemy is not a phenomenon sui generis, but
rather a phenomenon of attempted assimilation proceeding from Gnosticism -
or at least so Jung believed. Even the chief sacrament of Christendom, the
Holy Eucharist or Mass, was regarded by Jung as an alchemical work connected
with a Third Century Gnostic alchemist Zosimos of Panopolis, in whom he
placed the historical point of the convergence of Gnosticism and alchemy.
(These considerations were explained by Jung in his Transformation Symbolism
in the Mass, first published in the Eranos Yearbook 1944/45, and later
included in Psychology and Western Religion, Princeton University Press,
1984.) Years later, one of Jung's academic associates, Prof. Gilles Quispel,
came to coin a phrase reflecting Jung's point of view. "Alchemy," the Dutch
scholar said, "is the Yoga of the Gnostics."
Perhaps one of the most significant contributions along these lines was
given to us by Jung's singularly insightful disciple Marie-Louise von Franz,
who devoted herself to the translation and explanation of a treatise first
discovered by Jung entitled Aurora Consurgens and attributed to St Thomas
Aquinas. This renowned saint, so the legend states, had a vision of the
Sophia of God after meditating on the Song of Songs of Solomon and,
following the command received in the vision, wrote this alchemical
treatise. The Aurora differs from most other alchemical works inasmuch as
its format is predominantly religious and filled with biblical references,
and even more importantly, because it represents the alchemical opus as a
process whereby the feminine wisdom Sophia must be liberated. Written in
seven poetic but scholarly chapters, the treatise traces the liberation of
Sophia from confinement by way of the alchemical phases of transformation.
It is thus through the agency of a brilliant woman disciple that the great
project envisioned by Jung in 1912 came to a renewed emphasis. Led by the
rediscovered words of the "angelic doctor" Aquinas, contemporary students of
religion and psychology were confronted once again with the Gnostic task of
alchemy. Published in German in 1957 and in English in 1966, Marie-Louise
von Franz's work brought Jung's gnostic-alchemical vision in to full view
once more. While at the individual level alchemy may assuredly be concerned
with the redemption of the Lumen Naturae concealed in the
psycho-physiological recesses of the human personality, the Aurora and also
Jung's Answer to Job appear to point to a yet larger and more universal
opus.
Crying from the depths of the chaos of this world, the wisdom-woman Sophia
calls out to the alchemists of our age. Depth-psychology has indeed served
as one of the principal avenues through which this redemptive project has
been made known. The time may be approaching, and may in fact have come
already, when potential alchemists in various disciplines and spiritual
traditions may address themselves to this universal task of alchemical
liberation. In 1950 Jung was greatly encouraged when Pope Pius XII used
several manifestly alchemical allusions, such as "heavenly marriage", in
Apostolic Constitution, "Munificentissimus Deus", the official document
declaring the dogma of the assumption of the Virgin Mary, (the Catholic
Sophia). In our time alchemy has come into its own, and beginning with the
most recent two decades Gnosticism has begun its return journey also. The
stone that the builders rejected is moving ever closer to the structure of
Western culture.
In the garden of Jung's country home in Bollingen stands a large cube-shaped
stone inscribed by his own hand with magical and alchemical symbols. In his
last revelatory dream prior to his death, Jung saw a huge round stone
engraved with the words "And this shall be a sign unto you of Wholeness and
Oneness". Perhaps these signs of the wondrous stone of the great work will
serve to remind the many whose lives and souls were touched by the Swiss
Wizard, of the great work to be done, the great miracle to be accomplished.
It is to be hoped that such an awakening of mindfulness will please Carl
Gustav Jung in the far land to which he journeyed, and that it will assist
those who are still in this sub-lunar world in their search for the
quintessence, the stone of the philosophers and the supreme good.
Notes
1. Information concerning this visit was given to the writer in a private
interview by Prof. Gilles Quispel.
2. For material on Jung's Gnostic interests and on the Sermons, the reader
is referred to the author's work The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to
the Dead, (Quest Books, 1982).
3. Memories, Dreams, Reflections of C.G. Jung, ed. by Aniela Jaffe, transl.
by R. and C. Winston (Vintage, 1963) p. 200.
4. Ibid. pp. 192-193.
5. Wilhelm, Neue Zuricher Zeitung, 21 January, 1929.
6. Jung's Last Years and Other Essays, by Aniela Jaffe, trans. by R.F.C.
Hull and Murray Stein (Spring Publications, 1984) p. 54.